Retired Washington State Judge Beth Andrus, who was serving as an arbitrator, wrote that Michelle Ritter engaged “in defamation by falsely and with malice accusing Schmidt of sexual assault and sexual harassment” and noted the 32-year-old did “everything she could possibly do” to avoid being questioned about her rape accusations under oath.
“Either her accusation of rape was false, she knew it was false, and the declaration confirmed it was false,” Andrus wrote, “or Ritter was willing to swear out a false declaration in exchange for $14 million and a payment of $1 million to her parents…”
This was in reference to a declaration Ritter signed as part of an earlier settlement agreement with Schmidt, where she attested that all contact with Schmidt was “entirely consensual” and “never coerced or compelled.”
The arbitrator found Ritter liable to pay $10.7 million to Schmidt — a number that will likely escalate upon on her final decision in a few weeks.
Andrus also slammed Ritter for making her claims on social media, writing, “Ritter chose to use a very public forum to manipulate this system for her own personal benefit — not for the benefit of victims at large …
“Ritter’s shameful false claims of sexual assault, advanced to extort and punish Schmidt, undermine and impair the pursuit of justice by legitimate victims.”
The findings were made on April 29, but are now being made public because Ritter filed a federal lawsuit in California where she attached the arbitrator’s ruling to a sworn declaration. The federal lawsuit is to challenge the arbitration award and to assert various other claims.
Ritter had also accused Schmidt, who served as Google’s CEO from 20021 to 2011, of stalking and building an insider “backdoor” to Google servers to spy on her and other employees.
She started dating Schmidt in 2021 — and the tech titan helped fund her AI startup Steel Perlot with $100 million — but they were reportedly on the outs by May 2024.
She filed an explosive lawsuit in in Los Angeles County Superior Court last September, in which she alleged Schmidt. 71, assaulted her on a yacht off the coast of Mexico in 2021 and again at the 2023 Burning Man festival.
“He followed me into a shower, slammed me against the wall, and forcibly raped me,” Ritter previously alleged. “I begged him to stop and cried out that he was hurting me, but he ignored my pleas. The next morning, Schmidt attempted to convince me that I enjoyed the assault.”
She similarly alleged that in August 2023, at the Burning Man festival in Nevada, Schmidt initiated sex while she slept.
“I clearly told him ‘no’ and tried to get him to stop, but I had learned that attempting to resist physically would be futile and make things worse,” she added in the same legal filing.
Ritter further accused Schmidt of unwanted voyeurism and pressuring her with sexual fetishes.
“On multiple occasions, Schmidt surreptitiously photographed me without my consent while I was nude, including entering the bathroom to take photographs while I was showering,” she stated.
The relationship ended after photos surfaced in early 2024 of Schmidt with a 22-year-old woman, according to court documents. Post-breakup, Ritter claimed that the surveillance escalated.
Schmidt has been married to his wife, Wendy, since 1980. He was recently linked to Gloria-Sophie Burkandt, a 27-year-old model, economist and PhD candidate who is the daughter of Bavarian Minister-President Markus Söder, but he is currently not seeing anyone seriously, we’re told.
in her filing, Ritter claimed she had not been allowed to give evidence and called the judge’s statements “false, disparaging, and defamatory.”
Ritter said she was the vicim of an “abuse-of-process pattern,” insisting the arbitration proceedings were “not used to adjudicate a genuine dispute on the merits but to manufacture a damages judgment against a pro se sexual-assault reporter through procedural mechanisms she could not effectively contest.”
